


Childhood is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies

by shadowkat67



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV), No Fandom
Genre: Buffy the Vampire Slayer References, Essays, Gen, Literary References & Allusions, Literature, Meta, Poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-09-15
Updated: 2003-09-15
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:54:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22398148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadowkat67/pseuds/shadowkat67
Summary: Meta on a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Collections: March Meta Matters Challenge





	Childhood is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies

Childhood Is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies

_Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age  
The child is grown, and puts away childish things.  
Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies._

_Nobody that matters, that is. Distant relatives of course  
Die, whom one never has seen or has seen for an hour,  
And they gave one candy in a pink-and-green stripéd bag,  
or a jack-knife,  
And went away, and cannot really be said to have lived at all._

_And cats die. They lie on the floor and lash their tails,  
And their reticent fur is suddenly all in motion  
With fleas that one never knew were there,  
Polished and brown, knowing all there is to know,  
Trekking off into the living world.  
You fetch a shoe-box, but it's much too small, because she won't  
curl up now:  
So you find a bigger box, and bury her in the yard, and weep.  
But you do not wake up a month from then, two months  
A year from then, two years, in the middle of the night  
And weep, with your knuckles in your mouth, and say Oh, God! Oh, God!  
Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies that matters,  
—mothers and fathers don't die._

_And if you have said, "For heaven's sake, must you always  
be kissing a person?"  
Or, "I do wish to gracious you'd stop tapping on the window  
with your thimble!"  
Tomorrow, or even the day after tomorrow if you're busy having fun,  
Is plenty of time to say, "I'm sorry, mother."_

_To be grown up is to sit at the table with people who have died,  
who neither listen nor speak;  
Who do not drink their tea, though they always said  
Tea was such a comfort._

_Run down into the cellar and bring up the last jar of raspberries;  
they are not tempted.  
Flatter them, ask them what was it they said exactly  
That time, to the bishop, or to the overseer, or to Mrs. Mason;  
They are not taken in.  
Shout at them, get red in the face, rise,  
Drag them up out of their chairs by their stiff shoulders and  
shake them and yell at them;  
They are not startled, they are not even embarrassed; they slide  
back into their chairs._

_Your tea is cold now._  
You drink it standing up,  
And leave the house. 

Been thinking about childhood lately...now that I'm at least 16 years past it. And my little brother is going to have a baby. Auntie shadowkat. Weird ring to it. (I shouldn't say anything of course - might jinx it.) While I appear to be reaching that age where if I don't have kids, I never will. Not overly upset about that, strangely enough. But it got me thinking about childhood... How time seemed drag on so. Days lasted forever. Weeks. Months. I'd never ever grow up. Never get out of high school. Never make it through that class. Or the long hot sweat drenched summers at the local pool. Now much older - time seems to jump by when I'm not looking. Suddenly I'm at midlife and I've done nothing I think to show for it. Where has my childhood gone?? My dreams? My fantasies? Those days I sat telling myself stories in my room or listening to the radio watching my Siamese cat named Simon, long dead these 20 years. The days I explored tunnels and creeks and made mud-pies and picked raspberries...and told ghost stories in forts made of blankets.

[Discussion of a remembered childhood death ensues...like the poem]I remember my first brush with death/mortality as a child. It was a boy on a bicycle. A boy I'd known since pre-school. He was naturally accident prone. Breaking his neck one week, his arm the next - it became a joke. With his casts and neck braces. His name was Todd. He was blond, white blond hair, the type of white hair small children have after being in the sun, bleached naturally and soft as feathers. Pale skin. Lanky. With blue eyes - I think. Geeky. I wasn't close friends with him, exactly. But our parents did know each other. My mother often volunteered with his. And once we shared a baby-sitter. It was a rainy day, I remember that. I couldn't have been much older than 7, because it was when we were living in Pennsylvania, West Chester, out in the woods. I was staying with my Grandmother (also long dead now - these past seven years), who had had her share of death. But I didn't understand death. It was unreal to me, much like Ms. Millay's poem...in my world no one died. I remember bugging my Grandmother - about why she didn't cry when her cat Claymat died. I thought she was cruel. She told me the story of her own mother dying and explained that it toughened her against other types of death. She'd also lost children, and a brother...her twin. So she'd had her share. Clearly a cat, to her at least, was just one more. At any rate...on the radio we heard about my friend Todd or maybe it was the phone? Funny thing memory. How it blurs things and embellishes others. I remember learning the details the next day at school - we discussed it like we were discussing a horror movie or a some stray dog, not our friend. The kids saw it you see. They'd been in the bus when he got hit. He was the boy on the bicycle, he crossed behind a bus and the on-coming car didn't see him...the gory details the kids related still seem surreal to me. Yet I find it odd that out of all my memories, his name is one of the few I clearly remember. His face. And that story.

Why is that? Why do we remember some events from our childhood and not others? I asked a friend this recently while we wandered around the parks beneath the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges...I wondered why some memories fade. Why as we grow older, some of us fondly remember our childhood, see it as the Kingdom where nobody dies and joy is forever preserved? Because it isn't really. People die. If you're lucky it will not affect you. While I experienced death as a child - it always somehow stayed surreal to me. My mother did not believe in taking us kids to funerals (I had to beg her to let us come to my Grandmothers), she saw them as morbid horrible events that she wished to spare us from. For me? It was making the death more real somehow. Even though my grandmother seemed more like a wax dummy than a body - demonstrating to me at least that souls existed. When she died she looked like an empty husk, so something must have departed.

But it's not just death - I feel in this poem, but a wistfulness, a despair at growing older, an odd nostalgia for easier or if not easier, less responsible times. How the adult often forgets the trauma of the child. Just as Catherine Madison, in the BTVS S1 episode the Witch, believed her high school days were the best. She would do anything to relive those pristine days when she was head cheer leader . I had a friend as a child, also back in PA, whose parents met in high school, to them their best years were the high school years. They'd never moved past those years. He was the most popular boy. She was the most popular girl. As adults they struggled to recapture that brief time in their lives. And they were always telling their children that high school was the best years of your life. My parents believed college and the adult years were - high school they said was brief and for most traumatic (they were right in my case, I barely remember those years and have 0 desire to relive them, in a way my mother was more like Buffy's with no desire to be the high school girl again, while my best friend's was Catherine Madison wishing she could, possibly through her daughter.) No it's not high school I feel nostalgic for, so much as childhood - that gentler, more innocent time, before I realized how different boys were from girls. Or knew what a period meant - outside of the punctuation mark at the end of a sentence. Those years before puberty set in and all the raging hormones. My mother of course does not remember my childhood quite as rosily as I do...perhaps because our memories protect us? Preserve what we wish them to preserve? I don't know. Yet, even within those memories, dark shadows hide, shadows like the boy on the bicycle who died so tragically (which I discuss in the hidden section above) or the vague shadows that break into that sunny innocence and force us to grow up just a little. Truth is, no matter how much better the past looks in hindsight, it isn't really. It's just blurred is all.


End file.
